Coping with illness taps finances, patience

Editor's note: Because of the stigma sometimes associated with mental illness, the names in this story have been changed to protect the subjects' identities. For the same reason, no identifying details or descriptions have been provided. But while the story may concern only one family, the problems and heartaches it relates are typical of many of the mentally ill and their families.

Roberta L. thinks her daughter Sarah's problems began even before she was born, and she's convinced her first husband's philandering had something to do with it.

Unbeknownst to Roberta, he was carrying on an illicit affair while Roberta was pregnant with Sarah. His mistress put a hex on Roberta, Roberta believes, and she believes that hex has followed Sarah for her entire life. It hasn't helped that Sarah has the same middle name as her father's mistress.

Sarah "was not a normal baby," Roberta says. She was 19 months old before she began walking, and she remained an unusually quiet child. Her childhood was "pretty rough on me," Roberta says.

For one thing, there were the high fevers, which often kept Sarah and Roberta up at night. They occurred frequently and often topped 105 degrees. Roberta says the doctors feared possible brain damage from the fevers, but no tests were ever done.

Not only was Sarah frequently sick, she had behavioral problems as well. She'd take off all her clothes and jump into the neighbors' swimming pool. She'd pull the cat's tail, then laugh about it. She wouldn't play with her dolls, preferring the tractors and other toys of her brother. But that may have been just to make the brother, Thomas, mad, Roberta says.

It was Thomas who first mentioned to his mother that Sarah didn't seem to know right from wrong.

Sarah's troubles with the law began with an arrest on a marijuana charge. After that, she left for college, but got arrested there on charges of possessing crack cocaine.

"She was always getting in with the wrong people," her mother says.

It was at college that Sarah's physical and mental health deteriorated further. She learned she had cancer and was given three months to live, her mother says. It was at about that time that the crack arrest occurred. Roberta says that with the help of various alternative medicines, Sarah had periods of remission, but the cancer has now returned.

Sarah, who according to her mother has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, is what mental health experts and people in law enforcement call a "frequent flier" -- a mentally ill person with repeated arrests and incarcerations. Her mother thinks that's a waste.

"They spend so much money running them [the mentally ill] in and out of jail, and they don't help them," she says.

That's true, but it's never been the job of law enforcement to run a mental institution. Better programs are needed to get the mentally ill the help they need before they become entangled in the criminal justice system.

Sarah has been arrested six times in the past three years alone, spending 95 days in jail. Charges have ranged from drug possession to forgery to petit theft to grand theft. A recent arrest concerned a bad-check charge.

"She doesn't think that's wrong," her mother says.

Roberta, who cannot conceal the deep weariness and frustration she feels from trying to cope with her daughter's many troubles, keeps coming back to that hex. She's been searching for a priest to do an exorcism on Sarah, and also wants her to legally drop her middle name, the one she shares with her father's long-ago mistress.

Violence has not been a problem with Sarah, Roberta says. At least not against others. But she has tried three times to kill herself. The first time was when she first learned of her cancer.

The cancer, the mental illness and the arrests have been a major drain on the family finances. Sarah also racks up huge telephone bills -- in the neighborhood of $600 -- whenever she is in the hospital, Roberta says. Sarah doesn't work and is on Social Security disability, so most of the financial burden has fallen on her mother.

"It has cost me everything I had," Roberta says. "I've been working all my life, and oh, my, these attorneys. The last one was $17,000, and $10,000 was for another. Then there were a couple others for $5,000. I owned three apartments, but had to sell them to pay the lawyers."

Now she's selling her house.

What's really hurting, she says, are the payments Sarah has to make every time she sees her probation officer. Those payments, which go to the Department of Corrections, are for court costs and restitution, Sarah says. She says she still owes about $6,000 and has no idea how she will pay it.

Sarah has spent time at the state mental hospital in Chattahoochee, where she was committed under the Baker Act. She is currently receiving treatment as an outpatient at a South Florida mental health clinic. She is painfully aware of the impact her illnesses and troubles have had on her family.

She says, in a voice racked with guilt and pain, "I feel I've been a burden to my mother my whole life."